The topic for our next discussion group is 'language.' It can be interpreted broadly! Please bring a piece of writing (creative or informational), music, art, a video clip or podcast episode to spark conversation. Email us at honeypowercollective@gmail.com if you'd like more information!

Super short summary: There is so much to delve into around prisons and the prison industrial complex, but I happened upon some beautiful notes I felt compelled to share. One to a prisoner. One from a prisoner. Both exploring more the emotional realities of imprisonment, centered around loss of freedom and connection to the outside world.

A Peek at the Golden Age of Prison Radio - Maurice Chammah for the Marshall Project

Super short summary: In the 1930s, there was a very popular radio show called “Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls” that featured prisoners singing, dancing, and acting. It was so popular that at one point it had 5 million listeners! It was a platform used to promote prisoner rehabilitation and inmates also gave interviews about life behind bars. I’m interested in the idea of using music and art for rehabilitation but also is it ethical to broadcast to the public? How does spectatorship change this? How does this tie into the popularity of crime shows now like Serial?

Fog Count - Leslie Jamison “The Empathy Exams” / Oxford American

Super short summary: A really beautifully written look at confinement. Charlie Engle was an ultra-marathon runner who was imprisoned after an IRS agent saw a documentary about him and wondered how he financed his lifestyle. He is out now and running again!

Inside a Bolivian Jail - BBC

Super short summary: Within these Bolivian jails, inmates are given “freedom” and are left to their own devices with no guards, and no official laws. They must pay for their stay within the jail: meaning they must create their own miniature self-sustaining, self-contained society, complete with their own political system, laws, and capitalism-- it is probably the closest example of anarcho-capitalism we have.

Super short summary: With new advancements in our understanding of neurobiology and psychology, we increasingly learn that the idea of “free will” is becoming more and more distant. This presents a moral dilemma. What does justice mean when the cause of someone’s sadistic and criminal behavior is biological?

Super short summary: As Michelle Alexander proclaims “More Black Men Are In Prison Today Than Were Enslaved In 1850,” Ruth Gilmore responds with explaining “Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%”.

Why? The War on Drugs for instance was exclusively waged in poor communities of color, leading to the disintegration of the black family structure, increase in this populations high school dropout rates, addiction, mental illness, and being in the pipeline to the prison industrial complex. Others in the new abolitionist movement comment like the founders of Critical Resistance believe that the abolition of slavery is like the abolition of the prison system. Critical Resistance as founded by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis both feel they are part of a history of black radical visionaries who want to disrupt the systemic inequality that is grounded in certain social practices such as the prison industrial complex and The War On Drugs. The PIC existence remains as a symbolic institution giving legitimacy to how our society is structured to oppress specifically homeless, gender non-conforming, low-income, migrants and disportionately people of color. The belief of the new abolitionists is that we should move past our structures by dissolving these structures, their associated social practices of racism, and their implicit impact on society by rehabilitating criminal behavior through liberatory and democratic justice. Here is an interactive chart that may help understand how the Prison Industrial Prison sustains or works as a phenomenon if you want want to learn more. Otherwise, here are the facts on race and prison.

Restorative Justice: The World I Want - Jo Bauen for Stanford Social Innovation Review

Submitted by Jack Sample

https://ssir.org/articles/entry/restorative_justice_the_world_i_want

Super short summary: Bauen challenges our society’s insistence on a justice system predicated on punishing criminal “others” and proposes a shift towards “Restorative Justice”. Her practical reconsideration of how inmates may be supported to relate with one another, their families, and themselves with compassionate awareness addresses the American prison system’s explicit goal of rehabilitation while eschewing its implicit intention of dehumanization. The Prison Mindfulness Institute (http://www.prisonmindfulness.org) has many programs that address how prisons can function more like monasteries, and how we outside the system may foster greater “solidarity across differences” through a renewed perspective on justice and punishment.

We host a discussion club every few weeks where we choose a thought-provoking subject to come together to share and discuss articles and other forms of writing about. This week's topic: The Brain (science, philosophy, or abstract interpretation of).

We host a discussion club every few weeks where we choose a thought-provoking subject to come together to share and discuss articles and other forms of writing about. For the first discussion group, everyone

To the Harbormaster by Frank O’Hara

submitted by Beth B

“I wanted to be sure to reach you;

though my ship was on the way it got caught

in some moorings. I am always tying up

and then deciding to depart. In storms and

at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide

around my fathomless arms, I am unable

to understand the forms of my vanity

or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder

in my hand and the sun sinking. To

you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage

of my will. The terrible channels where

the wind drives me against the brown lips

of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet

I trust the sanity of my vessel; and

if it sinks, it may well be in answer

to the reasoning of the eternal voices,

the waves which have kept me from reaching you." _____________________________________________________________________________

My Father Spent 30 Years in Prison. Now He’s Out. By Ashley C. Ford (originally published by